Pandeism

Sometimes pantheists will use the term "pandeism" to underscore that they share with the deists the idea that God is not a personal God who desires to be worshipped. ~ John Armstrong

Pandeism (or Pan-Deism) is a theological doctrine which combines aspects of pantheism and deism. It holds that the creator of the universe actually became the universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity. Pandeism is proposed to explain, as it relates to deism, why God would create a universe and then abandon it, and as to pantheism, the origin and purpose of the universe. The word pandeism is a hybrid blend of the root words pantheism and deism, combining Ancient Greek: πᾶν pan “all” with Latin: deus which means "god".

I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong. We're all God. I'm not a god or the God, but we're all God and we're all potentially divine — and potentially evil. We all have everything within us and the Kingdom of Heaven is nigh and within us, and if you look hard enough you'll see it. ~ John Lennon

God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. ~ Warren B. Sharpe

God became the world to realize himself, in material form, to realize an eternal and infinite aim. It is for the purpose of realizing His eternal and infinite aim that He became the world. ~ Harry Waton

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! ~ William Wordsworth

"So what motivates God?" I asked. "Do you have the answer to that question, or are you just yanking my chain?"
"I can conceive of only one challenge for an omnipotent being—the challenge of destroying himself."
"You think God would want to commit suicide?" I asked.
"I'm not saying he wants anything. I'm saying it's the only challenge."
"I think God would prefer to exist than to not exist."
"That's thinking like a human, not like a God. You have a fear of death so you assume God would share your preference. But God would have no fears. Existing would be a choice. And there would be no pain of death, nor feelings of guilt or remorse or loss. Those are human feelings, not God feelings. God could simply choose to discontinue existence."
"There's a logical problem here, according to your way of thinking," I said. "If God knows the future, he already knows if he will choose to end his existence, and he knows if he will succeed at it, so there's no challenge there, either."
"Your thinking is getting clearer," he said. "Yes, he will know the future of his own existence under normal conditions. But would his omnipotence include knowing what happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would his knowledge of the future end at that point?"
"That sounds like a thoroughly unanswerable question. I think you've hit a dead end," I said.
"Maybe. But consider this. A God who knew the answer to that question would indeed know everything and have everything. For that reason he would be unmotivated to do anything or create anything. There would be no purpose to act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one nagging question—what happens if I cease to exist?—might be motivated to find the answer in order to complete his knowledge. And having no fear and no reason to continue existing, he might try it."
"How would we know either way?"
"We have the answer. It is our existence. The fact that we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we . . ."
I interrupted the old man in midsentence and stood straight up from the rocker. It felt as if a pulse of energy ran up my spine, compressing my lungs, electrifying my skin, bringing the hairs on the back of my neck to full alert. I moved closer to the fireplace, unable to absorb its heat.
"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" My brain was taking on too much knowledge. There was overflow and I needed to shake off the excess.
The old man looked at nothing and said, "We are God's debris."

The first section is a precursory discussion of the nature of the historical development of psychological-religious worldviews of life; the second section discusses the philosophical deistic and theosophist opinions of the pandeism of the ancient Egyptians and Indians up to Leibniz's Pre-established Harmony, and a harsh kind of material reality; the third and final section brings those metaphysical and physical worldviews together, pursuing them from the beginnings of idealism with the Indians up to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ev Hartmann and Eucken, to Spinozism the youngest Neo-Spinozism and neo-idealism, and finally arrives at empirism etc. and positivism in enumerating and discussing the actually strictly physical opinions (materialism, atomistic, energetic opinions and so forth).

It will be seen that this fact of the Immutability of REALITY, when clearly conceived, must serve to confute and refute the erroneous theories of certain schools of Pantheism which hold that "God becomes the Universe by changing into the Universe." Thus it is sought to identify Nature with God, whereby, as Schopenhauer said, "you show God to the door." If God changes Himself into The Phenomenal Universe, then God is non-existent and we need not concern ourselves any more about Him, for he has committed suicide by Change.

Today we are witnessing movements of all kinds toward union. In the commercial world we are seeing great mergers. In the economic world we are seeing whole nations uniting. In the labor world, the unions are waxing bigger and becoming more powerful. In the financial world there is evident an increasing monopoly. In the religious world there are great movements toward union and not only in the professedly Christian world. The church of Rome uses the term "pandeism", to describe her current program of bringing under her wing the non-Christian religions of the world. In this, Rome will finally succeed, because the prediction says, "all the world wondered after the beast". (Revelation 13:3)

Regarding Western Pantheism, some people feel that the word "pantheism" is misused. Since theology is the study of religion and and means "all," pantheism implies following all religions. The principal of following all named deities, then, would be called Pan-De-ism. So, pantheist or pandeist? You decide.

Miles Batty, Teaching Witchcraft: A Guide for Teachers and Students of the Old Religion (Paperback - Mar 27, 2009) p. 38.

If the Bible is only human lore, and not divine truth, then we have no real answer to those who say, "Let's pick the best out of all religions and blend it all into Pan-Deism - one world religion with one god made out of many".

One high school teacher once told me that Śankara said that God became the world. In the beginning there was God and then he created the world out of himself. So God became the world. And now there is no God. It is exactly like making idli out of rice. The rice is gone; only idli is there. Later, I repeated this as Śankara's philosophy to someone and he laughed so hard that I knew that there was some mistake in what I had said. But I didn't know what the mistake was and he didn't correct me either.

I first came upon this extension of ecumenism into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the "reunion of the churches," Roman, Orthodox, Anglican]]. [...] We may perhaps ask what is the ultimate aim of the Curia in promoting the pan-deist movement. [...] They do not necessarily discern in Rome's ecumenism and pan-deism a project for world dominion.

In the greatest poet of the older generation in France, Victor Hugo, a weak species of pantheistic deism asserts itself, in spite of his enthusiastic rationalism; we still trace in him the influence of the preceding century; religion is glorified at the expense of religions; love, which unites, at the expense of dogma, which separates and scatters.

Belief in a single deity, however, is consistent with science and natural cause as long as that belief is in a First Cause that has not and does not, subsequently, alter or change natural order. Reader and Author alike have their own personal preferences, but what is important to the next world-view and way of thinking is accommodating to the still-widespread longing to believe in a "supreme being" while at the same time, not adopting anything which can disturb natural order and natural cause. The next belief system would need to be like an umbrella that reached out to cover atheism, deism, agnosticism, and pantheism (that is, pan-deism). Only in this way, now, can we bring humanity into the real age of scientific discovery, build a new civilization, and ultimately expand the human race far out into the universe beyond this cramped small planet in which we are now so confined.

Charles Brough, Untwisting the Social Sciences (2006), p. 142.

The next [world-view] belief system might be like an umbrella that reaches out to cover atheism, deism, agnosticism, and pan-deism because the difference between those assorted beliefs pale in comparison to the importance of not tolerating the belief that some "mystical being" can alter cause and effect, thus interfering with the science and technology we need to replace this old civilization before it is too late.

Charles Brough Destiny and Civilization: The Evolutionary Explanation of Religion and History (2008), p. 210.

FREE THINKERS: all people whose beliefs regarding "spirits" are compatible with modern science. Deism, pan-deism, agnosticism and atheism are compatible; theism is not.

Charles Brough Destiny and Civilization: The Evolutionary Explanation of Religion and History (2008), p. 295.

Deism and pan-deism, as well as agnosticism and atheism, are all Non-Theisms.

Charles Brough, The Last Civilization (2010), p. 246:

Pandeism, like deism, has no specific theistic creed or scripture that defines the belief as a system, so there is freedom so far to consider a God that is the sentient Universe, or a God that is the non-sentient Universe, or to further attempt to specify God by ascribing attributes that do not appear, at least, to contradict the necessary minimal set.

Vedantic Hinduism is organized monistic pandeism and acknowledges up front that its scriptures are myths and legends to be mined for parabolic insight, not "divinely inspired truth", and Buddhism isn't a religion, it is an essentially atheistic psychosocial philosophy that unfortunately incorporates some of the religious cosmology of Vedic Hinduism, in particular the notion of serial reincarnation, that is probably false.

Pure Vedantic Hinduism as described in particular in the Upanishads is monist and either pandeist or panendeist - Brahman is the Universe, we (as Atman or "God-souls") are a part of Brahman and Brahman itself, parts separated from the whole to be able to appreciate the whole and ever seeking to rejoin the whole and its perfect state of being as all things. Brahman in the Upanishads is not a being that is worshipped - they make it absolutely clear that Brahman is indifferent to worship and is not the object of worship.

A deist who believes in God that is the Universe is a pandeist, and is not only compatible with the theorem, but is now affirmed in their conditional belief as being demonstrably proven as a theorem of information theory.

A pandeist scientist or philosopher studying the Universe is not necessarily irrational, nor is he or she particularly distinguishable, from an atheist scientist or philosopher who loves the subject of his or her work.

Some of us think that postmodernity represents a similar change of dominant worldviews, one which could turn out to be just as singular as modernity by being a stunning amalgam of James and Weber. If we are correct, then the changed attitudes, assumptions, and values might work together to change ways of life which in turn transform our geographies of mind and being, that is, both the actual physical landscapes and the mental valuescapes we inhabit. One increasingly common outcome of this ongoing transformation, itself a symptom perhaps of post-industrial secular societies, is the movement away from self-denial toward a denial of the supernatural. This development promises to fundamentally alter future geographies of mind and being by shifting the locus of causality from an exalted Godhead to the domain of Nature. How this Nature is ultimately defined has broad repercussions for the, at times, artificial distinction between religious and secular worldviews. For Levine, “secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we're living in now ... such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of 'fullness' that religion has always promised.” For others, this “fullness” is present in more religious-oriented pantheistic or pandeistic belief systems with, in the latter case, the inclusion of God as the ever unfolding expression of a complex universe with an identifiable beginning but no teleological direction necessarily present.

All the actions of created intelligences are not merely the actions of God. He has created a universe of beings which are said to act freely and responsibly as the proximate causes of their own moral actions. When individuals do evil things it is not God the Creator and Preserver acting. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism. [However, t]he Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism.

[W]hatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist.

God is growth, God is structure/knowledge, God is everything and nothing simultaneously. And, rather heretically for the Abrahamic religions, to perceive i.e. to cognate i.e. to be of matter i.e. to be structured energy generating a gravimetric field is an aspect of God relating to another aspect of God through light, which is of course God. In this, the underlying metaphysics are most definitely Pandeist.

Were the revolutionary Pandeist concepts of the Third Testament just a bunch of lies invented by a monster? Could the synergy between deism and pantheism championed by Damarus be truly mythical, as Ammold Paramo had advocated?

The empu uses a typical pedanda ketu, "crown" which is tall and red, and a ball. Another man leads Pande ceremonies on the island. He represents a curious mix of Buddhism, Hinduism, and, if it can be called this, "Pandeism." Thirty or so years ago some of the Singaraja Pande leaders felt the need for proclaiming themselves to be something other than Hindu, since they considered their fundamental beliefs to be different enough from Hinduism to warrant making a distinction.

The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy; particularly archaeoastronomy, astronomy, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology, and physics.

Translation: "If God is all, involves everything, swallows every word, the deep word, the word love, then God is very big, huge, infinite; and for a God really like this, the pandeism of Nejar is one of the strongest poetic ideas that we have reached in the world of poetry. And could you expect of this poet, this poetic creator, that in a little less than twenty years, he has arrived at this great poetic illumination?

"A doctrine which, because of its little-circumspect idealism, offends not just faith, but reason itself (KANT): it would be useful to show the dangerous errors, to Religion as much as to Moral, of that French psychologist, who seduced minds (COUSIN), by showing how his bold and audacious philosophy breaks the barrier of the holy Theology, placing his own authority before any other: he profanes the mysteries, declaring them partly devoid of meaning, and partly reducing them to vulgar allusions and pure metaphors; forces, as a learned Critic noted, the revelation to swap places with instinctive thought and assertion without reflection without and places reason outside man, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual pandeism, which is absurd to us and insulting to the Supreme Being, which gravely offends freedom itself, etc, etc.

Yesterday's pan-deists, who worshiped trees and brooks, have become members of various environmental groups doing much the same thing. People like Al Gore, others, and perhaps the reforesting Obama, have become their latter day shamans.

Pandeism is another belief that states that God is identical to the universe, but God no longer exists in a way where He can be contacted; therefore, this theory can only be proven to exist by reason. Pandeism views the entire universe as being from God and now the universe is the entirety of God, but the universe at some point in time will fold back into one single being which is God Himself that created all. Pandeism raises the question as to why would God create a universe and then abandon it? As this relates to pantheism, it raises the question of how did the universe come about what is its aim and purpose?

"In Pliny, whom one could call, if not a Spinozist, then perhaps a Pandeist, Nature is not a being divided off or separated from the world. His nature is the whole of creation, in concrete, and the same appears to be true also of his divinity."

India worships three hundred millions of divinities. To her, God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored. Snakes and monsters are her special divinities. Her pan-deism is a pandemonium.

Are we virtuous merely because we are restrained by the fetters of the law? We hear men prophecy that this war means the death of Christianity and an era of Pandeism or perhaps even the destruction of all which we call modern civilization and culture. We hear men predict that the ultimate result of the war will be a blessing to humanity.

Translation: "They want to build up their closed little worlds in the great city of the Muslims, but they came again and again into friction with the Hindu majority society: caste system vs. egalitarianism of the Muslims, meat consumption of the Muslims vs. vegetarianism of Hindus, monotheism of the Muslims vs. Pandeism and veneration of saints among the Hindus."

God thus excludes the world; he is only its cause; in no sense is he effect, of himself or anything else. Pantheism (better, "pandeism," for again it is not really the theos that is described) means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there, is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects.

God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment).

These distinctions make sense only when AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is assumed (hence Spinoza's failure, who assumed mere A). Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created - this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as well, are implicitly talking about.

I think Pandeism was a system; — and that when I say the country or kingdom of Pandæa, I express myself in a manner similar to what I should do, if I said the Popish kingdom or the kingdoms of Popery; or again, the Greeks have many idle ceremonies in their church, meaning the Greeks of all nations: or, the countries of the Pope are superstitions, &c. At the same time, I beg to be understood as not denying that there was such a kingdom as that of Pandae, the daughter of Cristna, any more than I would deny that there was a kingdom of France ruled by the eldest son of the church, or the eldest son of the Pope.

We have seen that though Cristna was said to have left many sons, he left his immense empire, which extended from the sources of the Indus to Cape Comorin, (for we find a Regio Pandionis near this point,) to his daughter Pandæa; but, from finding the icon of Buddha so constantly shaded with the nine Cobras, &c., I am induced to think that this Pandeism was a doctrine, which had been received both by Buddhists and Brahmins.

In that sense the latent rationality of Christianity comes to permeate the everyday experience of the modern world— its values are now variously incarnated in the family, civil society, and the state. What Engels particularly embraced in all of this was an idea of modern pantheism (or, rather, pandeism), a merging of divinity with progressing humanity, a happy dialectical synthesis that freed him from the fixed oppositions of the pietist ethos of devout longing and estrangement. "Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism. . . . The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the 'modern pantheists",' Engels wrote in one of his final letters to the soon-to-be-discarded Graebers.

The ontological validity of Pandeistic views aside... every side of the heated and long-lasting argument around the "hard problem of consciousness" seems to be simultaneously correct. Factual or not, the mere fact that a philosophical system can be conceived wherein those apparently mutually-exclusive views no longer contradict one another is remarkable.

The author apparently intended to divide up religious, rational and scientifically based philosophies, but found his material overwhelming, resulting in an effort that can shine through the principle of classification only darkly. This probably is also the source of the unsightly Greek-Latin compound word, 'Pandeism.' At page 228, he understands the difference from the more metaphysical kind of pantheism, an enhanced unified animism that is a popular religious worldview. In remembering this borrowing, we were struck by the vast expanse given the term. According to page 284, Scotus Erigena is one entirely, at p. 300 Anselm of Canterbury is 'half Pandeist'; but also Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, and even in Mendelssohn and Lessing is a kind of Pandeism found (p. 306 321 346s).

"Pantheism and Pandeism, Monism and Dualism: all these are really just different forms of God-light, various types of illumination of the basic concept, namely the highest, the height from which the various radiations in the human soul and project here is a mirror image, the perception of the characteristic nature of the individual, mediated by the temporal, familial and sociological milieu caused apprehension."

The WHO and MSF and other organizations do great work, but they often lack the long-term committment and grass-roots organization needed to build a sustainable program. Missionaries and hospitals like Holy Family also have made contributions and they recognize the need for providing economics-based aid (i.e. finding employment), but they lack the vigour and drive of the St. Stephens community. The government also does very little, but generally co- operates with St. Stephens in terms of getting OKs, partly because it is older than the Indian government itself and partly because it has a stellar reputation for secularism. Indeed, most of the staff is either Hindu or Moslem, but they are full of these pan-deist ideas, and even Zahir deliberately used the Christian word "God" rather than "Allah" when talking with me.

Paul La Porte, Social Work and Other Experiences in India (2003).

If divine becoming were complete, God's kenosis--God's self-emptying for the sake of love--would be total. In this pandeistic view, nothing of God would remain separate and apart from what God would become. Any separate divine existence would be inconsistent with God's unreserved participation in the lives and fortunes of the actualized phenomena.

In pandeism, God is no superintending, heavenly power, capable of hourly intervention into earthly affairs. No longer existing "above," God cannot intervene from above and cannot be blamed for failing to do so. Instead God bears all suffering, whether the fawn's or anyone else's.

Even so, a skeptic might ask, "Why must there be so much suffering,? Why could not the world's design omit or modify the events that cause it?" In pandeism, the reason is clear: to remain unified, a world must convey information through transactions. Reliable conveyance requires relatively simple, uniform laws. Laws designed to skip around suffering-causing events or to alter their natural consequences (i.e., their consequences under simple laws) would need to be vastly complicated or (equivalently) to contain numerous exceptions.

This one god could be of the deistic or pantheistic sort. Deism might be superior in explaining why God has seemingly left us to our own devices and pantheism could be the more logical option as it fits well with the ontological argument's 'maximally-great entity' and doesn't rely on unproven concepts about 'nothing' (as in 'creation out of nothing'). A mixture of the two, pandeism, could be the most likely God-concept of all.

Raphael Lataster, There was no Jesus, there is no God: A Scholarly Examination of the Scientific, Historical, and Philosophical Evidence & Arguments for Monotheism, page 165, 2013.

"Man leaves it to the philosophers, whether they are Theists, Pan-theists, Atheists, Deists (and why not also Pandeists?) to want; but the people are preached nothing of a god of everything and nothing with immortality."

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong. We're all God. I'm not a god or the God, but we're all God and we're all potentially divine — and potentially evil. We all have everything within us and the Kingdom of Heaven is nigh and within us, and if you look hard enough you'll see it.

"Caeiro interposes the distinction between the light and what "philosopher thoughts" want to constitute behind him. The things, as he sees them, are as they seem. His pandeism is based on a metaphysical thing, which should still become a school of thought under the modern seal of the twentieth century."

Suppose we would find the all-encompassing law of nature, we are looking for so that finally we could assure proudly, the world is built up this way and no differently -- immediately it would create a new question: What is behind this law, why is the world set up just so? This leads us beyond the limits of science into the field of religion. As an expert, a physicist should respond: We do not know, we'll never know. Others would say that God authored this law, that created the universe. A Pandeist might say that the all-encompassing law is God.

What is referred to herein as a "divine spirituality" is nothing but the intrinsic and unaided propensity and proclivity of matter to self-organize. This, of course, is capable of "dying" when the limit of expansion is reached, and the old-age Big Crunch starts. This is the way the Gaia Universe dies. Here I must side with Heracleitus, the Stoics, Bruno, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe and Hegel. Mind is eternal, mind never dies, mind is the universe. The Pandeist God is the Salmon-God: when it spawns it dies. [They] side with Nietzsche — God is dead — only that for Nietzsche there never was a 'god.'

Professor Ramon G. Mendoza, History of Ideas: Pantheism (1996).

The site seems to exude some force, as if there is a multitude of souls in everything around you. I don't know if this is the philosophy of Pandeism or Pantheism, but in the tranquility of the moment, I don't care either.

Not all monists are pantheists. Exclusive monists believe that the universe, the God of the pantheist, simply does not exist. In addition, monists can be Deists, pandeists, theists or panentheists; believing in a monotheistic God that is omnipotent and all-pervading, and both transcendent and immanent.

The theory presented in the Anacalypsis... is that a secret religious order, which [Higgins] labeled Pandeism, had continued from ancient times to the present day, stretching at least from Greece to India, and possibly having covered the entire world.

What appeared here, at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism (see theion) that is the legacy of the Milesians.

In certain passages of the OT the concept of Babylon emerges into an archetypal figure for the proud, God-defying forces of this world. In the NT it is even more clearly a type of pan-deism formed from a synthesis of Christianity and paganism; this is indicated symbolically in the description of the woman riding on the Beast.

Translation: Otávio de Faria spoke of the pandeism of Carlos Nejar. Not a pantheist poetry, but pandeist. I want to say, a cosmogony, one I sing generally, a chansonnier of the human being and the holy ghost. But the holy ghost in the human being.

The basic questions of political theology are: a polemic against any theological immanentism and pandeism of Hegel's type, a polemic against polydeism and synonyms for political pluralism, a polemic against each of atheism and its modern variants of materialism and scientism.

But even if the nightmare was a vision of the truth, Mr Mond can still believe in God, because he says that God became the universe. Therefore the universe is God.
No. In becoming the universe God abdicated. He destroyed himself as God. He turned what he had been, his true self, into nullity and thereby forfeited the Godlike qualities which pertained to him. The universe which he has become is also his grave. He has no control in it or over it. God, as God, is dead.

Jubal... is a devout and fierce individualist in a world filled with cults and bureaucracies, and by novel's end it is he, not Jill nor Mike, that is still a stranger, still tilting against the windmills. He honestly believes in his own free will, which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, 'Thou art God!' Mike, by contrast, readily abandons his Martian beliefs for human ones, even as he claims to merely find a congress between them.

The Eastern view of morality springs from a fundamentally different view of reality. We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.

It is certain that this concept forms a fundamental moral bases of religious whose cable markers are more than two-thirds of the world's population, while special influence on the capacities of each of them, by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, a nihilism antihuman in Buddhism, and an incipient but eclectic pandeism progressing in Bramanist Indian beliefs; and those who admit the principle ideal of universal brotherhood, it is worthwhile scientific naturalism aesthetic greek-roman and modern inhales, substantially, all the teaching European audience, and against which they protested always very logically and the Orthodox Christians, Pope Paul II to Joseph Maistre."

In "Spreading Worry on the Dragon Boat River", san yu, also known as san yang, san ye, and san er hu, are the words used to refer to the worship of reproduction under Pandeism, as demonstrated in romantic songs sung by village people to show the strong impulse of vitality and humanity and the beauty of wildness.

God did not create the world, He became the world. God became the world to realize himself, in material form, to realize an eternal and infinite aim. It is for the purpose of realizing His eternal and infinite aim that He became the world. Now notice this. God had to conceive the one primordial idea to become the world. Thus the idea preceded the world. This is supposed to be the relation between cause and effect. The cause is assumed to be prior to and independent of the the effect; while the effect is assumed to be posterior to and dependent upon the cause.

Translation: We will see later that the Indian people have also taught Pandeism. The last condition exists in this doctrine in entering into the deity Brahma or Vishnu in question. So says the Bhagavad-Gita about Krishna-Vishnu, after many teachings about a perfect existence.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

"As a general characteristic H. chose the name of a neo-transcendental subsistence relationism or more substance: a dominant Pan-deism (not -theism); of history, this includes atheism, natural philosophy a quasi-pantheism - the Absolute as a definite principally under validity considerations - one."

Pandeism. This is a kind of pantheism that incorporates a form of deism, holding that the universe is identical to God but also that God was previously a conscious and sentient force or entity that designed and created the universe.